


Speaking in Tongues

by Felix_Heyday



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Communication, Domestic, M/M, Near Future, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-28
Updated: 2015-10-28
Packaged: 2018-04-28 14:31:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,345
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5094215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Felix_Heyday/pseuds/Felix_Heyday
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After thirty years of dimension-hopping, Ford’s forgotten how to speak “domestic”. But he’s trying.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Speaking in Tongues

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Trope Bingo "Chosen Family" prompt. Title is sneaked out of “Radio Nowhere” by Bruce Springsteen, because I’ve got a theme going here.

In his defense, he likely would have forgotten how to speak English if he hadn’t perfected a universal translator in Dimension 36. He’d had to master eleven ultra-foreign languages prior to that, as well as become proficient in twenty-six more, including seven never intended for someone with arytenoid cartilage and three that required tentacles for proper conjugation. Whatever neural pathways his brain had previously devoted to the luxury of subtle interpersonal expression were torn up and rerouted in the name of survival. 

Not that he had ever been truly fluent in “successful domestic life” to begin with. 

He wasn’t formally documenting the rehabilitation process, but he had developed a set of mental phrasebooks that he was updating as needed. Here was “Hello” as a synonym for “Greetings”, followed by sub-entries for “Hi” (informal) and “Yo” (too informal). Here was the appropriate pressure for a human handshake, and the correct period of eye contact with a supermarket cashier, and “Fine, thank you” as the ritual response to “How are you doing?” in most social situations. 

The length of these phrasebooks varied. _Mentor_ had proven much easier to populate than _Great-Uncle_ , the significance of which was not lost on him in light of his missteps leading up to the events of Weirdmageddon. He was working on that. _Son_ was nearly blank due to circumstances, and _Neighbor_ due to lack of practice. _Stranger_ currently had more pages than _Friend_ , but with Fiddleford’s patience he was working on that too. 

Then there was the highly non-standard creole of _(Stan)ford/ley_. Against all expectation, it was coming back to him. 

He and Stanley were sharing a bed again for the first time since they were teenagers. A king-sized frame and mattress of dubious origin had been hauled to the house in Soos’s truck and installed without question in what used to be the parlor. A set of dentures sat in a glass on one nightstand, and a twenty-deep stack of notebooks and scientific journals teetered on the other. Ford was learning to come to bed most nights. The cold weather made it easier to remember. 

He undressed in the dark to the sound of Stanley snoring. His coat, sweater, shirt and pants were left folded over the chest of weapons that stood against the footboard. He slipped his gun under the pillow and climbed in with a quiet sigh. The lingering heat from the fireplace had nothing on the welcome of broken-in blankets. Stanley always kept the bed warm for him. He settled on his side, facing the wall, and closed his eyes. 

One...two...three...

On cue, Stanley rolled over and plastered himself to his back. A heavy arm wormed its way around his middle under the covers. 

There was a sound like a rusty engine as Stanley cleared his throat in his sleep. He buried his nose in Ford’s hair and breathed in deeply. “mm...‘anford.”

The sleep-talking suggested that Ford had caught him in between REM cycles. So did the sleep-groping. Stanley’s hand lay loosely curled against his sternum for no more than the span of a few breaths before starting to wander. It drifted down his stomach and then dipped under the waistband of his boxers, provoking a rush of feeling that Ford could only label _exasperfondness_. That was his brother for you, a man who would steal third base without waking up.

He consulted his libido. It was on board with this. He leaned back into the living furnace of Stanley’s embrace, stroked his wrist, and urged his hand down further. After all this time and exposure to near infinite variety, it still didn’t take much more than his brother touching him to dismantle the walls of his intellect and admit a flood of arousal through the gaps. A broad chest and a soft stomach, a crooked line of long-ago busted knuckles—god help him, they were still enough. They were still everything.

It apparently took another minute for the sensory feedback to fully register, but the snoring finally gave way to a terminal snort.

“Wha—oh. _Oh_.” Stanley’s voice was even rougher than usual as it sleepily rolled from confusion to enlightenment. He got a better grip on Ford and chuckled. “Heh. Horndog.”

Ford was not going to argue over who had initiated, at least not when Stanley had enough waking coordination to get him hard. The slow pull of Stanley's fingers worked their magic on his circulatory system, aided by the press of lips to the back of his neck and a nudge-and-rub against his ass while Stanley tried to catch up. He unlocked his throat and hummed to show his appreciation. Then, even though he would have been perfectly content to lie still and get off without any further effort, he turned over and kissed Stanley on the mouth.

It was intuitive. 

_I want this._

He rubbed his cheek against the sandpaper of Stanley’s jaw and then drew his lips along the slightly softer skin underneath. He caressed the bicep that still wanted to show off and flex under the path of his palm and then got his hand under Stanley’s undershirt. 

_I want you._

He pulled Stanley on top of him.

The sex was empirically better than it had been when they were teenagers. He wouldn’t have thought so, given the lower testosterone production of two men their age, but confidence conclusively won out over the sweaty, nervous fumbling of a supposed reproductive prime. Stanley knew how to take his time these days. He clutched at Ford like he thought one of them might disappear any second, but there was an ease to his hands that hadn’t been there forty years and who knew how many partners ago. 

Ford in turn had a much better idea of what he wanted. He hooked an ankle around Stanley’s calf and grabbed him by the love handles. The dozen or so sexual encounters he’d had since leaving this dimension were driven as much by curiosity as by any real need, but sex with Stanley was as simple and satisfying as drinking cold water when he was parched or closing his aching eyes when was tired.

 _I want this_ , his fingertips said, digging into soft flesh. _I want you_ , his teeth repeated, leaving marks on Stanley’s shoulder. _I want this I want you I want this I want you I want this I want you._

Not everything was as easily said or understood.

“Stanford! Mabel’s on the computer!”

He initially passed this off as an empty utterance. Stanley still seemed equally impressed by and at sea with Voice Over Internet Protocol technology. Ford refused to let him near his own computer network, and so one laptop was grudgingly installed in Stanley’s office, on an isolated digital subscriber line with a mile-high firewall because Stanley had unsurprisingly and unerringly discovered internet poker and streaming pornography in his first ten minutes online. 

“Hang on a minute, sweetie,” he heard Stanley say a moment later. “Your Grunkle Ford’s going deaf.”

Footsteps approached the study. The quiet rattle of the door knob provoked a spark of annoyance. There had been multiple conversations about who exactly owned which doors in a shared house and the non-negotiable necessity of knocking.

“Stanford!”

Ford set down his pen, pushed up his glasses, and rubbed his eyes. “What?”

“Unlock the door.”

“How do you know it’s locked if you didn’t try to come in here without knocking?”

“Because I’ve got psychic powers.” Stanley began making B movie sound effects. “Whoo...whoo…I see a nerd getting up from his desk. I see him crossing a room to open the door for his better-looking brother...”

Ford did indeed get up and opened the door, but took satisfaction in the thought that Stanley hadn’t predicted the eye-rolling. “Firstly, ‘whoo’ is for ghosts, not psychics. Secondly, ghosts don’t actually make that sound. They—”

“Yeah, yeah. Can it, smart guy. Mabel’s on the computer.”

“I heard you the first time.” A thought occurred to him, and he glanced at where his car keys and crossbow were lying. “Is there some sort of emergency?”

Stanley looked impatient. “Not unless you count getting her braces tightened.”

“All right.” He paused, trying to figure out what exactly what was expected of him. “Good. Give her my regards.”

Judging by the way impatience gave way to irritation Stanley’s face, that hadn’t been it. “Give them yourself.”

Only the quick application of teeth to the tip of his tongue kept him from saying he didn’t have time for guessing games. He frowned, mentally reviewing the data. He had spoken with Mabel only the day before yesterday, during his bi-weekly Mystery Hunting correspondence lesson with Dipper. It had been a perfectly pleasant conversation. He’d learned more than he had ever needed to know about some sort of pop singer who might also have been a beaver.

Stan heaved a sigh and spelled it out for him. “She’s thirteen and she’s got herself a twerpy little boyfriend. How much longer you think she’s gonna want to call her grunkles all the time? Just talk to her, all right?”

Ford consented to being dragged down the hall. 

Mabel’s beaming face was waiting for him on the monitor when he pulled a second chair up to Stanley’s desk. Behind her was the cotton candy pink of her bedroom wall, plastered with posters and magazine collages. There did indeed seem to be a new collection of photographs featuring a particularly twerpy-looking young boy.

“Grunkle Ford!” she squealed. 

Her smile proved infectious. “Hello, Mabel!”

The next quarter of an hour was filled with a breathless report of the goings-on in the upper echelons of Beachfront Middle School. Ford listened attentively, occasionally elbowing Stanley, who had started uhhuh-ing indiscriminately and checking the results page on some sort of fantasy boxing league website five minutes in. 

“If this girl persists in spreading rumors about you,” Ford advised after a particularly worrisome confession, “I think a dose of phenolphthalein—”

“No poisoning,” Stanley interrupted without looking up from his website. “Just mess her face up a little.”

All right, so Stanley hadn't been wrong. It wasn't wasted effort. By the time Mabel was called to dinner, Stanley was in a better mood and Ford himself had a much greater appreciation for the mysteries and dangers of the eighth grade. He commandeered the mouse after Stanley mis-clicked twice trying to close the application, and tutted over the state of modern education.

“Are they really only starting quadratic equations this year? I could swear we learned that in the sixth grade.”

Stanley snatched the mouse back from him. “Don’t ask me. But hey, if you’re looking to get a hard-on over math, I told Wendy you’d help her study for some trigonometry test she’s got."

Ford raised an eyebrow. “Why did you do that?”

“Because she wouldn’t shut her trap about it all day Saturday. Got even less work done than usual.”

He could feel himself wading into conversational quagmire, and yet he took another step nonetheless. “Why am I helping her study?”

Stanley gave him a look over his glasses that said, _Seriously?_ “Because I only passed tenth grade math sitting next to you.”

“I mean, why in the world would either of us be invested in your employee passing trigonometry?”

With a narrowing of the eyes, _Seriously?_ became _Are you fucking kidding me?_ “Because she’s family, dumbass. Look, if you don’t want to—”

“I didn’t say that,” Ford protested. He considered the proposition fully and then nodded. “I can make time tomorrow evening.”

It wasn’t actually that large of an imposition. He was confident that he could teach anyone with half a brain all they needed to know about basic trigonometry within an hour. In fact, he had been recently tinkering with an inversion setting for the memory gun. If Fiddleford could be enlisted to help, he was fairly certain he could kill two birds with one stone by attempting to beam the entirety of the young lady’s textbook directly into her head. Now that would be a net benefit to everybody. 

He added the appointment to his whiteboard when he went down to the basement that evening. As he set out his tools and a disassembled memory gun, he shuffled the phrasebook for _Employer’s Brother_ over several spaces until it sat directly to one side of _Great-Uncle_. He examined the two together and wondered if it would be easier to combine them. There was no sense in duplicating effort. 

To his mild chagrin, the employees weren't going anywhere. Stanley’s ridiculous business remained the household's primary source of income. It had paid the mortgage on a property that had quadrupled in value since the 1970s and, with some tightfisted grumbling from Stanley, had bought him a new computer system and a used Jeep for his work. The landscape of research grants had undergone a few earthquakes in the last thirty years, and the Mystery Shack—idiotic and intellectually dishonest though it was—kept groceries in the fridge while Ford slogged through the publishing process. 

Stanley had done right by him. 

Inflation was proving harder to get his mind around than smartphones or the demotion of Pluto. His brain occasionally insisted that he could buy a gallon of milk, a dozen eggs, a pound of bacon, and a loaf of bread and still get change back from a five dollar bill. Speaking of which...

“Stanley? How much milk do we have left?”

It was one o’clock in the morning by the time he got around to asking this. Work on the memory gun had given way to a fit of journal-writing, which had then led to an hour of trying to upload his new maps of the forest into the global positioning system on his phone, which had then led to another hour of cursing at the global positioning on his phone. Eventually he remembered the grocery list he had started drafting on his left hand and came upstairs.

Stanley was still awake, slouched in his armchair in the dark living room. He was watching the sort of late-night movie that, judging by the terrible dialogue, was functionally a test signal with explosions. He glanced away from the screen for a second, looking baffled by the question. 

“We have milk?”

Ford sighed and headed to the kitchen, ignoring Stanley’s growl of frustration when he momentarily blocked the television. He opened the refrigerator and took inventory. What they had was approximately one half of a fluid ounce in the bottom of an otherwise empty milk carton. He patted down his pockets, found a pen behind his ear, and started adding items to the list-in-progress taped to the fridge. 

“Are you messing with the shopping list? What are you putting on there?” For a man who was partially deaf in one ear, Stanley was suspiciously sharp of hearing when it came to anything that might inconvenience him. He was still a little cranky over having spent an hour at the hardware store last week looking for a sonic flange, which Ford could have sworn was already invented in this dimension. 

“Milk, bread, spaghetti, tomato sauce,” Ford rattled off as he wrote, “baloney, isopropyl alcohol, gauze, condoms…”

Stanley groaned. “We’ve got condoms, and for the love of God, don’t put them on the list. I make Soos do the shopping sometimes.”

“Fine,” Ford said, scratching it out, “but it will be your fault if we run out.”

“There’s eighteen left in the box, so unless you plan on putting out more often, this isn’t a condom emergency.”

Ford stuck his head around the corner, frowning skeptically. “You don’t know if we have milk, but you know exactly how many condoms we have.”

“Yeah. Go figure. We’ve got this much lube too.” Stanley held his thumb and forefinger apart to indicate the line in the bottle, then turned his hand and flipped him the bird.

Ford laughed despite himself. “Do you want anything while I’m up?”

Stanley shook his cola, eyes back on the screen. The pit rattled around in the almost-empty can.

They had more soda, at least. Ford grabbed a can from the refrigerator and then paused. An indefinable word sat on the tip of his tongue, something belonging to the separate dimension of 1960s New Jersey: a light on in the kitchen, the glow of the television in the living room, and a vague sense from behind a child’s bedroom door of the complicated life that grown-ups led after bedtime. The word eluded him, but after a moment he took a glass down from the cupboard, threw in a few ice cubes, and fixed Stanley a proper drink. Or at least as proper a drink as a knock-off soda could be in the middle of the night. 

He carried it to the living room and set it down next to the lamp. Stanley blinked when he saw it, and Ford cleared his throat to forestall any questions about what he dirtied up a glass for.

“I was thinking about driving out to get some photographs of the flying ice squids before the next thaw.”

Stanley frowned. His gaze flickered to the screen, where someone was firing a machine gun from the deck of a yacht, and then turned back to Ford. “Sounds dangerous.”

“Relatively.” Ford shrugged, consulted his tentatively merged phrasebooks, and then ventured, “Could I borrow Soos to help put some snow chains on the tires and maybe mount a gas-powered flamethrower to the roof?”

“Off the clock? I’m not paying him to play Indiana Jones.”

“I did see that movie, you know. He didn’t have a flamethrower. But yes, off the clock.”

Stan snorted. “Since when do you need help with that kind of thing?”

Ford shrugged again. “He’s..not a bad mechanic. And he’s part of the household.”

As luck would have it, his inflection managed to leave the question mark off the end of that last sentence. He caught the lift at the corner of Stanley’s mouth and knew he’d gotten it right. 

“Yeah,” Stanley said, sounding fonder of the strange young man than he would likely ever admit. “Why not? It would make the kid’s month.”

“What about you?” Ford asked.

"What about me?"

“Want to come?”

“What, are you crazy?” Stanley picked up the glass and took a drink. “Like I got nothing better to do with my time than freeze my ass off waiting to get eaten by some ice monster...”

Ford could have corrected him. The giant ice squid were incapable of eating a human being due to the limited size of their mouths. They were, however, capable of crushing a man to death or impaling one with their beaks, so he let the point stand. 

“...but if you really need someone to watch your back, fine.”

He didn’t, really. But it wouldn’t hurt to have someone keeping the heat running in the Jeep. 

"Thanks, Stan."

A sofa was still on the list of things that Stanley was under no circumstances to steal (and certainly not a chesterfield if the opportunity presented itself, dark brown preferred). In the meantime, there was nowhere to sit but the arm of the chair. He was aware of Stanley glancing up at him as he did so, but once resting, he was disinclined to get up again. Stanley's shoulder pressed warm against his arm, and that hat—particularly ludicrous in combination with an undershirt, boxer shorts, and slippers—begged to be taken off. Ford plucked it off Stanley's head and set it on the side table. Instinctively, he ran his fingers through the flattened part of Stanley's hair, trying to put it right. 

Stanley shifted at the contact, leaning closer. Ford stilled. Then he did it again, his fingers sliding through more slowly this time, drawing little crop circles in the thick strands. Stanley’s eyes half-closed in contentment as he took a drink and let his hand settle just above Ford’s knee with a brief squeeze of understanding. 

_I want to be here._

_I want you to be here too._


End file.
